This is a new ladder which we're implementing in the server on Pokemon Showdown! It is a randbat in its entirety but what's different is that we have limited the list of pokemon which will be picked from. The list of the pokemon which will be picked from is entirely dependent on what the current theme is. The theme will change every month, alongside the ladder. This is just some wacky fun thing that we (aldaron and I with help from a few others), thought would be a nice, fun, silly thing to do.

The list we have chosen for this month is: Thanksgiving Feast. I will announce when the ladder is up and running in this thread & it will be a good time for all.

Personally, I find this to be a little be underwhelming - There should be more silliness involved than just a whitelist of allowed pokemon. Maybe add new rules to the tier, for example, any bird pokemon deal 1.5x damage, or all birds get instantly killed. There are tons of things you could do with this concept, but at the moment it seems lame in my opinion...

It's starting to annoy me how a lot of Pokemon don't have a STAB attack. I know it's random but it's really trollish when your Gothitelle has Leftovers, Shadow Tag, Substitute and Calm Mind, but no Psychic attack.

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Pelipper is surprisingly good. All the sets I've had (and met) so far have had 3 or 4 attacking moves. Hydro Pump/Scald, Air Slash and Ice Beam get great coverage and its natural bulk let's it take most neutral attacks. Braviary is also great too, a Sheer Force boosted Rock Slide kills all the Flying types in the tier. Zapdos is brilliant too. I got it once with Substitute/Roost/Thunderbolt/Hidden Power Grass and Leftovers. NOTHING breaks through its substitutes except aerodactyl and archeops, who both get murdered by Thunderbolt. This thing is impossibly difficult to take down behind a sub. None of the Psychic types so far have been particularly good though.

Really digging the ladder right now good to see you nerds playing it. I would like to apologize for the rushed sense of the month of November for this but you best believe that things are going to get more and more awesome for the meta here now that we have months to prepare these types of things.

Every Sigilyph I've gotten only had Psychic attacks. Dark types wall every Sigilyph set I've come across. Also, pretty much all Sigilyphs have Psycho Shift but not all of them have a Status Orb, rendering the move near useless. It's also murdered by dark attacks. Zapdos is killed by rock and ice type attacks but most of the pokemon that carry those moves are weak to Thunderbolt (Articuno, Aerodactyl etc). And for some reason, Zapdos has Lightningrod despite it not being released yet. Most of the Pokemon that beat Zapdos can't beat it when it's behind a substitute, a move which is present on nearly all its sets. And considering the number of grass types and flying types in this metagame, it's extremely easy to set up a sub.

Sigilyph is obviously more threatening if it's accumulated lots of Cosmic Power boosts but it can still be easily phazed by Skarmory, and can't get past Dark types such as Bisharp and Mandibuzz. If you're one of the lucky ones who got a Sigilyph with an attack other than Stored Power, you should be very happy. Zapdos is much harder to stop than Sigilyph in most cases, but if you lack a Sigilyph counter you're almost guranteed to lose.

man why is everyone complaining about Zapdos when Sigyliph is fucking tearing shit up whenever someone gets it. Shit is scary as hell to face.

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I'm gonna confirm this, with burn orb and psycho shift its so easy to stall out physical dark attackers such as weavile or Bisharp. Stack up to +6 with stored power and cosmic power/roost your way out of anything. What a cool pokemon.

I think a good idea for a future month would be one where only all the Pokemon from one type can be used (e.g. all rock types). It would be a completely different type of metagame. For example, using the rock example, most Pokemon have high defense, so some Pokemon that are usually physical attackers would be better as special attackers in that metagame, and a Pokemon like Cradily would be probably a top tier threat due to it not being weak to Water and Ground, and Sandstream would raise the special defense of the whole tier, and so on.

Or in an all-grass metagame, it would be different too, with no spinners, and nobody would be able to use STAB moves, (moves like Sludge Bomb and HP Fire/Ice would probably be the main moves), Leech Seed doesn't work, likely rain/sun weather wars, and so on.

And lets not even start with an all-Dragon metagame, it would probably be one of the most offensive and fast-paced metagames ever.

I think mono-type metagames would certainly be interesting to play, even with randbats, if you ever run out of ideas lol.